The First Sixty Minutes of a Brand Crisis

The first sixty minutes of a brand crisis are the window in which the first version of the story sets. What a communications team does in that hour shapes coverage more than anything it does over the following week.

Somebody forwards a screenshot at 4:40 on a Thursday afternoon. A video, a thread, a headline, a customer post that has more engagement than it should. The message attached to it is always some version of: is this a problem?

What happens in the next sixty minutes will do more to shape how the story gets written than anything the team does over the following week. Not because sixty minutes is enough time to fix anything, but because it is roughly the window in which the first version of the narrative sets, and after that you are arguing with an account that already exists rather than helping to write it.

The clock starts when you find out, not when it happened

Worth saying explicitly, because it changes the maths. If a video went up nine hours ago and reached you now, you are not at minute zero. You are at minute zero of your response and hour nine of the story, and the posture that makes sense at hour nine is different from the one that makes sense at minute ten.

The first thing to establish, before anything else, is how old this actually is and how far it has already travelled. A team that skips this step routinely publishes a careful holding statement into a conversation that peaked and ended two days earlier, which reintroduces the story to everyone who missed it.

This is also the clearest argument for detection that watches continuously rather than a team that finds out when a screenshot arrives. The difference between hour one and hour nine is almost entirely a monitoring question, and it is decided long before the crisis starts.

Minutes 0 to 10: verify and capture

Before deciding anything, establish that the thing is real and preserve it.

Reproduce it yourself. Open the post, the article, the video. Confirm it exists, confirm it says what the screenshot says it says, and confirm it is about you rather than a company with a similar name or an old incident being recirculated. Recycled content presented as current is common enough that checking dates should be reflexive.

Capture everything. Screenshots with timestamps, the URL, the account, the engagement numbers as they stand right now. Content gets deleted, edited and locked during a crisis, and a team that did not capture the original in the first ten minutes frequently spends the next day arguing about what was actually said.

Check whether it has spread. One post with forty views is a different situation from the same post quoted by four larger accounts. Look for the reposts, not just the original.

Minutes 10 to 20: the three questions

Everything that follows depends on the answers to three questions, and they should be asked in this order.

Is it ours? Is this our product, our employee, our supplier, our advert, our responsibility in any form a reasonable person would recognise. The answer is sometimes no, and that changes the response entirely, from defence to clarification.

Is it true? The honest answer at minute fifteen is usually partly, or unknown. That is fine and it is important not to force it. What is not fine is guessing. If nobody in the room knows whether the claim is accurate, the correct statement of position is that you are checking, not that you are confident it is wrong.

Who is harmed? If there is an actual injured party, a customer who was hurt, a person who was treated badly, an employee who was affected, then that determines tone before anything else does. Responses that lead with reputation management while a real person is in the middle of it read exactly as what they are, and the audience is extremely good at spotting the difference.

These three answers, written in a single line each, are the brief for everything that comes next.

Minutes 20 to 35: get the smallest possible group on a call

Crises get slower as more people join. The instinct during the first hour is to loop in everyone who might have a view, and it is the single most common reason teams reach hour three without having said anything.

The working group for the first hour is three people. One who owns the response and will write it. One who can verify facts from the operational side, which might be the product lead, the store manager, the head of engineering, whoever actually knows what happened. One who can approve publication without needing to ask anybody else.

That third role is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that determines whether anything gets published inside the hour. If the person on the call has to escalate to somebody unreachable for sign-off, then the real approval chain has not been established and the first hour will be spent discovering that.

Agree the next checkpoint before ending the call. A specific time, usually twenty or thirty minutes out, when this same group reconvenes with whatever has changed.

Minutes 35 to 50: choose a posture, then draft

There are fewer options than it feels like in the moment. In practice there are four.

Acknowledge. You know about it, you are looking into it, here is when you will say more. This is the default for anything credible, unresolved and spreading. It is what a holding statement is for, and it commits you to almost nothing while buying the time to find out.

Correct. The claim contains a specific factual error you can disprove now. This works only when the correction is clean, documented and narrow. Correcting one detail of an otherwise accurate story reads as deflection and usually extends the cycle by a day.

Act, then say. Something is genuinely wrong and can be fixed immediately: pull the advert, take down the page, suspend the product. Doing the thing before announcing it is almost always better than announcing an intention to consider it.

Say nothing yet. Covered below, and a legitimate choice when it is a choice.

Draft short. The first published response in a crisis should be shorter than anyone in the room wants it to be. Every additional sentence is an additional thing that can be quoted against you when more facts emerge, and the purpose of this message is not to resolve the situation but to establish that you are present and paying attention.

Minutes 50 to 60: publish, or decide not to

Two acceptable outcomes at minute sixty. Something is published, or there is a recorded decision not to publish yet with a named time to revisit.

The failure state is neither. A team that reaches the end of the hour still circulating a draft, still waiting on one more opinion, still unsure, has made a decision by default, and it is the one decision nobody would have chosen deliberately.

If publishing, put it where the conversation is. A statement on a newsroom page that nobody visits is not a response to a story happening on social. Reply in the channel, then link out if there is more to say.

If not publishing, write down why, who decided, and when it gets looked at again. This matters more than it sounds. It converts silence from an accident into a position, and if the thing escalates later, the record of a deliberate decision is a considerably better place to be than a record of nothing.

What not to do, all of which happens constantly

Do not delete. It has already been screenshotted. Deletion converts a story about the original problem into a story about your conduct, which is a worse story and one you cannot answer.

Do not argue with individuals. Replying to critics one at a time, at volume, reads as defensive, produces dozens of quotable exchanges, and guarantees that one of the replies will be worse than the rest.

Do not lead with legal language. Phrasing written to limit liability reads to a general audience as a company that cares about liability more than about what happened. Legal review is necessary. Legal voice is not.

Do not speculate about cause. “This appears to have been an isolated error by an individual” is the sentence teams regret most often, because it is asserted early, quoted forever, and frequently turns out to be wrong in a way that makes the second statement much harder to write.

Do not promise a timeline you do not control. “Full findings within 48 hours” is a commitment to a second news cycle at a fixed time, and if the investigation is not finished, you have created a new story about a missed deadline.

When silence is genuinely right

Responding introduces a story to everyone who follows you but had not seen it. For a complaint that is currently confined to a handful of accounts with no press interest and no growth, that trade is often bad. The sensible posture is prepared silence: draft the response, get it approved, hold it, and keep watching. If the thing grows, publishing takes two minutes because the work is done. If it does not, you have spent nothing.

The distinction that matters is between silence chosen and silence defaulted into. The first is a strategy with a trigger attached. The second is a team hoping the problem goes away, which it sometimes does, right up until the time it does not.

The hour is mostly won beforehand

Everything above is achievable in sixty minutes only if certain things already exist. It is worth being honest that a team doing all of this for the first time during a real crisis will not hit these timings, and that is a planning failure rather than an execution one.

The things that make the hour possible: a named decision-maker with the authority to publish and a deputy for when they are unreachable, contact details that are current and stored somewhere reachable from a phone, three or four pre-drafted holding statement structures for the scenario types your business actually faces, a single agreed channel for crisis coordination that is not the channel where normal work happens, and monitoring that will tell you at hour one rather than hour nine.

None of that takes long to assemble. All of it is much easier to assemble on an ordinary Wednesday than at 4:40 on a Thursday afternoon with a screenshot in the group chat.

Common questions

What should you do in the first hour of a PR crisis?

Verify that the thing is real and capture the evidence, answer three questions about whether it is yours, whether it is true and who is affected, get the named decision-maker on a call, then either publish a holding statement or make an explicit decision not to yet. The single worst outcome is reaching sixty minutes without having decided anything.

How quickly should a company respond to a crisis?

Fast enough that the first version of the story is not written entirely without you, which in practice usually means acknowledging within the first hour or two. Speed matters less than being right, so the usual answer is a short holding statement quickly rather than a complete response slowly.

Is it ever right to say nothing during a crisis?

Yes, and often. If the story has no traction beyond a handful of accounts, if responding would introduce it to an audience that has not seen it, or if you genuinely do not yet know whether the claim is true, silence can be correct. What is never correct is silence that happens because nobody decided anything.

Who should be in the room during the first hour of a crisis?

As few people as can make a decision. Typically one person who owns the response, one who can verify facts from the operational side, and one who can approve publication without escalating further. Large groups in the first hour produce delay, not better judgement.

Should you delete negative posts during a crisis?

Almost never. Deletion is itself a story, it is always screenshotted first, and it converts a complaint about the original issue into a complaint about your conduct, which is usually worse and always harder to answer.